Location Description:

Oc & Lau Restaurant is a Vietnamese place in Garden Grove that's similar to a quán ôc. Come here for the snails. The garlic-butter-spotted escargot arrives sizzling on a cast-iron skillet, sprinkled with fistfuls of herbs. Use the wooden skewers supplied to coax the meat out of the shell. Successfully extracted, the curlicue flesh will look rather alien, as though it just burst out from the chest of an astronaut. It has two textures: rubbery in parts, pasty and soft in others. You might contemplate Fibonacci as you move on to the ôc len xào dùa, mud creeper sea snails simmered in a coconut-cream-based sauce that tastes akin to a very mild Thai green curry. Suck out these fingertip-sized mollusks one-by-one with your mouth.